What a waste
Alan Powers is disappointed by an exhibition about the development of sustainable cities
Prospective mayors of London make green noises. How could they fail to do so, however unconvincingly? It is hard to oppose the idea of decreasing pollution, saving the countryside by developing brownfield sites and improving public transport. My heart almost goes out to the pro-motorist and small shop candidate, Geoffrey Ben-Nathan, for his daring to be different. The issue of quality of environ- ment ought to play a crucial part in local government, and when better to launch the idea than at this moment of economic pros- perity, among a constituency which is sup- posed to contain the intellectual leaders of the nation?
The Royal Institute of British Architects has taken the opportunity of the mayoral election to stage an exhibition london living city (sic), described as 'the interactive exhi- bition about the development of sustain- able cities', with the collaboration of Herbert Girardet, a well-known author in the field of urban environmentalism (at 66 Portland Place, Wl, until 8 July). It promises 'a debate about sustainability, and includes interviews with three of the candidates. The pro-motorist and small shop candidate is not included among these three, which seems to limit the scope of 'debate', but since this word is seldom now used with its proper meaning of a dialectical open discussion, but understood rather as a form of fuzzy focus-group,- this is not surprising.
The exhibition includes an inflatable screen in a darkened room, on which are projected images of a dsytopian city and statistics about its material wastefulness. The projection itself is solar-powered. There are statistics on the floor and the walls, and barely legible panels of overlong and platitudinous text, including a lot of dayglo orange decoration, as if to deter reading even further. In the larger part of the gallery, screens and headphones offer the interactive experience, a large would-be mayor talks (at a volume too low to hear properly) from a grid of TV monitors. A delivery tricycle and two architectural mod- els with lots of green bits spread them- selves thinly to symbolise the rich life of the sustainable future. This is an exhibition of a type commonly encountered, where the subliminal messages far outnumber the supraliminal ones, thus permitting an abdi- cation from explicitness and a spurious kind of objectivity.
These complaints may indicate merely a fogeyish petulance, but they are more in sorrow than anger. Earlier this year, when reviewing a Museum of London exhibition called Messages for the Mayor, I concluded that the post should be filled by a poet, meaning not a writer of verses, but a per- son of original vision. This is particularly necessary in the question of sustainability, where the hearts and minds of those who will be asked to suffer for this cause need to be inspired to a level higher than that of comparative statistics. We need to be shown something beautiful that we can believe in, and even, dare I say, actually debate with a sense of what the choices are. Here, surely, the architectural profession could have found its niche, whereas it has chosen instead to represent itself through technological fixes that offer no scope for imagination. The presentation seems almost deliberately unvisual, as if words and statistics were the only reality, even though these themselves are hardly pre- sented in a meaningful way. Are architects really so afraid of beautiful things that ordinary people understand that they can- not use them to support their arguments, but fall back on high-tech obfuscation?
The idea of sustainability involves the long-neglected sense of beauty at all levels, including the political. To practise it requires a more radical alteration to our patterns of thought, economics and politics than any candidate (even the Green and Natural Law candidates) are willing even to hint at. However solar-powered we may become, and however much our waste is recycled, we may be materially slightly bet- ter off, but still involved in propagating a way of life that is causing destruction some- where else in the world and creating other forms of waste. The opportunity for all the 'Go easy on the thieving, young Peter.' arts in this attempt to revoke centuries of thin grey materialism is not just to preach to us but to seduce us with an irresistible alternative. Architecture has missed it. Bet- ter luck next time.
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